


Love and Justice

by yosjiefo



Category: Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
Genre: F/M, Fratricide, Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 05:22:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21094079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yosjiefo/pseuds/yosjiefo
Summary: They'll carry their story with them to their graves if you let them.[Collection of Iuchar & Iucharba drabbles]





	1. Misery

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be real before we get into this that these are written over time, but I figured since I've been steadily writing things revolving around one or both of the brothers, I might as well give them their own collection. Will update as my mood strikes me; currently there is no definitive end in sight.
> 
> I also am a little indecisive with how I wish to refer to titles in this game. Grannvale is comprised of dukes and duchesses logically, but prince and princess tends to be thrown around in-game. If I ever figure it out, I'll go back and change things to be consistent.

  
“I don’t write poetry for misery.”

Leif quirks his eyebrow when he hears the axe knight say that. His lips purse into a firm line– they won’t speak a question that his eyes alone can gaze into existence. He hadn’t been listening very well to the prince of Dozel, only offering whatever filler words he could into the conversation. Where it was previously dominated by the ramblings of a man he had little idea why he was even amongst them in the liberation army to begin with, Njörun’s incomplete heir pulls out a chair and keeps his attention focused upon on the other brunet.

“What do you write for then?”

Iuchar chuckles in response; Leif doesn’t like that very much frankly– that crook of the mouth that seemed playful but bore an elitism to it. Iuchar was but a year older than him yet he held a hand over the conversation as if he were talking to a toddler and not a sixteen year old.

“To praise the sun.”

“You’re writing poetry right now,” Leif mutters as he rolls his eyes. “The sun doesn’t listen. It rises whether you compliment it or not.”

“And isn’t that in and of itself admirable?” Iuchar doesn’t skip a beat before he interjects his retort. “It’s resilient. It never cares for vanity. She’s a goddess I can’t compare to.”

A silence lulled over them but by no means was it stifling. A pretty portrait pans itself out: two young men sitting opposite one another in a war meeting long finished, their only company one another and their respective shadows. Iuchar sat back with poise and relaxed cheer whilst Leif was on the edge of his own seat, eyes tracing over an invisible oubliette that nobody– not even himself– could quite see. Calloused fingers intertwined in front of his chin as he contemplated a puzzle he couldn’t quite grasp.

Eventually, enough was enough, and Iuchar spoke: “You don’t need to think so hard about it. …Though I suppose you like that hobby a lot, don’t you?”

Leif looked back up from his nonexistent labyrinth and back up at his peer. His face, for just a moment, was the very picture of boyish surprise until it hardened just a second later with part suspicion. “…Just a little. I can’t let myself make decisions just because I feel like it.”

“How old are you, Your Highness?” Iuchar jokes. His jovial tone dies down soon though, his smile turning self-derisive. “...I don’t blame you though.”

“…Don’t you think a lot?”

“So you believe my head to be filled with more than just thoughts of women?”

“Well…” Leif stammers a bit, caught between indirect praise he didn’t mean to be giving and the option to instead insult him. He’s at a loss for words at first before an idle thought rescues him; as suddenly as it had come does his voice ring out, “You speak of justice too…!”

“…That I do.” Iuchar’s face takes on a more melancholic look as it contorts, trying to figure a way to smile even though his heart wishes to express something else entirely. “Say, what do you call justice anyway?”

A heavy question he didn’t expect, but this time Leif comes with an answer etched into his very heart. “Paying back what people deserve.”

“And what makes that any different from vengeance?”

“…So you _do_ write poetry for misery.”

Leif doesn’t find it in himself to answer. He doesn’t want to tear apart the one conviction he has– not again. His quip earns another small chuckle from the axe knight– as if the other had expected something like this. Iuchar’s expression hasn’t recovered yet and he turns his head so that Leonster’s prince can only view it in profile as he mutters:

“Too bad misery does not pay me.”


	2. Names

Iucharba. Even from the beginning, he was set up for being second-rate compared to his brothers.

It isn’t fair. How could his name be just a derivative of his brother’s? How could he hope to be his own person when you have to say Iuchar’s name first? How could he be somebody to recognize when he had two siblings before him to set the expectations? How could he be someone their father could care about when he never had the chance to wield Helswath, their family’s precious heirloom?

Iucharba was the third son, and he was doomed when Brian’s body bore Neir’s brand for all the world to see.

He never learned horseback riding unlike his brothers. Iuchar asks him why, but he doesn’t say. He’s already cultivating that tough guy image, and being a tough guy must mean not having a nice thing to say anymore.

Family dinners stopped being little wonderful pieces of memories and instead have risen to become bouts of yelling. What’s the point in civility? Iucharba yells and yells but to no avail. He’s the only one who has the balls to do it, to bring up the Lopt Sect and how they shouldn’t be letting them walk all over House Dozel.

Iuchar doesn’t say anything at dinners. He’s a frivolous coward to the end to everyone except the men stationed at his castle; Iucharba’s seen him spit ice at them. He’s no better than their older brother Brian who barks orders from sundown to sunrise. Those two are just people pushers.

If you’re going to push people, at least do it for the right thing, Iucharba says.

These monthly dinners have become hell on earth. Boys will be boys, people argue. They’ll say Iucharba’s just too young, too naive. They’ll come up with any excuse to believe that House Dozel is set on solid foundation and not the crumbling ties it really is.

Iucharba may not know diplomacy, but he knows purity. His love for Larcei— it must be something serious, or at least it’s deeper than Iuchar’s is. He’s nothing like his brother. They may share the same genes, but they’re like day and night. Petal and thorn. Blood and water.

Oh, how virtuous is the path of the pure? Who knows, especially in this climate, but if there’s one thing that is understood, it’s this:

Iucharba deserves this chance more than him.

A missive reports that Larcei’s approached the axe fighter, that Iucharba’s been swayed to the rebels’ side. Iuchar chuckles darkly at the news, cracking his first smile in a while at a man under his command. When the man asks him what to do, Iuchar calmly gives the order to prepare to fight.

Could he really? To his own younger brother?

Iuchar ignores the question. It wasn’t a matter of could he really. It was a matter of if Iucharba could. He silently prepares himself for this suicide mission, for the culmination of countless dinner fights. The axe knight dons his cape and throws away his second thoughts as he mounts his steed.

“Iucharba. It’s now or never.”

And he was off to the fields where death would surely claim him.


	3. Flowers

From the first moment Iuchar had met her, he knew she could move mountains. Isaach had been unknown territory, a place he would have to assume residence in for what may be the rest of his life so long as power stayed in House Dozel. A country of foreigners, a country of unknowns, a country that he would have to learn to call home.

Young and dumb and feeling like he was a fish swimming in air, Iuchar had fled to a field of flowers the first chance he could. He had hoped to find one — anything that reminded him of Grannvale, but his hands came up with a bunch of nothing.

Then he had seen her — a girl with short black hair. He was on his knees, scouring the oasis of petals and she stood towering over him.

“Jeez, you look sorry. Come on, who cries over this?”

She pulled him up off the ground. Her grip was rough, and Iuchar gained the first inkling for how strong this girl most likely was.

“Am I?” he asked in return.

To this, she had offered an incredulous look. “You’re telling me you didn’t know?” At that, she began to break into a snicker that bloomed into a full-blown laugh. Sure, it had been at his expense, but the sight catches his breath.

She looked nothing like the fairytales described fair maidens to be. She held none of the sensitivity and daintiness of one either, and he had a sneaking suspicion that she really wasn’t in this flower field for herself. Despite all that, despite the fact she carried none of the images that would make him associate this scenery with her, she seemed so pretty and so right in that moment.

“Larcei!” a girl from over yonder called. She held a basket and her hair reminded Iuchar a lot of cotton from faraway.

“Oof, gotta go.” The black-haired stranger — Larcei, he had learned — grabbed a fist full of the nearest flowers and thrusted the messy makeshift bouquet towards him. “Here. Stop crying when you’ve got stuff around you.”

He grabbed the bouquet and watched her leave, unable to move himself for a good while after the conversation.

If even Larcei could look like she belonged in a world so unlike her, Iuchar could find comfort in this unfamiliar land too. A glance at the bouquet, already starting to wither when he had returned to Castle Isaach, reminded him of her strength and made Isaach seem a little less a scary new world for him.


	4. Mend

“You're too soft on women,” your father tells you. He’s hardly the first and you doubt he’ll be the last either. You know they’ve said it ever since you’ve gotten to Isaach. It’s those ‘damn savages’, they say, wishing to find someone to blame besides you. You were a paragon, a prodigy, everything perfect except for the blood that flowed through your veins.

You were born with one imperfection, and Isaach will make many more out of you they fear.

You think about it as you sew a stitch into the clothes in front of you. You make the time to come here with the women of Isaach all in one house. It’s a monthly arrangement but one you look forward to all the same. A month stretches too long; you wish the moon would wax and wane faster if it would only reunite your fingers with the needle and thread even just a moment sooner.

The ladies around you speak of their fathers, of their brothers, their sons, their lovers. They speak of their mothers, their sisters, their daughters, their paramours. They speak of the sun, the moon, the stars, the war, the past, the future, and everything in between.

You eat their wisdom up for as long as they are willing to share it with you. It’s not much, as you are still the son of the man who strips away what rights they have and tells them to wear their bones to dust if they must, but you gather they are opening their hearts to you little by little.

“How’s your brother doing? The nice one,” they ask. You say you don’t know. You stopped being able to read his expressions the moment you decided you wanted to be able to read the ones in front of you instead. You’re not sure anymore whether it was Iucharba or you who severed the link between the two of you, but does it matter anymore? A war does not care who instigated it so much as it cares who wins in the end. All the spoils go to the winner; all the narrative gets crafted by the survivors.

Your thoughts grow dark and heavy as you recall his smile and suddenly you feel a prick on your fingers. A blot of blood forms. It is nothing compared to the wounds that you shall feel in battle, but the elderly lady next to you frets anyway. She treats it like it is a gash; she treats you like you are a child who has just learned the meaning of pain.

“You didn’t catch any blood onto that jacket you’re working on, did you? ” You turn it over and check. It retains its vivid green color, and you heave a sigh of relief. You had been given this piece from one of the other women here to help work on, having no one’s clothes yourself to mend. This scrap of someone important has been saved, and bless Od for that.

* * *

You mow down the soldier that charges at your horse, each swing of your axe effortless as you press on. Gone are the days that you are afforded the luxury to sit down and chat with women and help them fix liberators’ outfits. The cry of war has blown and you ride out for choice is no longer a privilege you may sign with your name.

You take your cape, wiping the blade of your weapon clean. Red stains crimson and you can’t be bothered to worry about such a frivolous thing as the field before you swims in blood. If your axe hadn’t been coated, your feet soon will be.

“Sir! That’s Sir Iucharba up ahead!” a man calls out to you as he tries to catch up with your steed. You look to where he’s pointing and see the young man you have been hunting. The battlefield dictates you are his enemy and he yours — just as the two of you have foretold. The day has come, and your axe cries for fratricide.

You meet him halfway. _It is a gentleman’s honor_, you say. _It's the mark of a barbarian_, he barks back. He is foolish and so cries he about you. The world is a canvas for the two of you, waiting to find out who shall be the one who shall paint it and who shall become its paint.

Talk is cheap, and you fail to dodge the strike your brother brings to your leg. It can still move, but it is a sign that tells you to discard the chatter lest you fall here. You readjust your grip, try your best to ignore the injury, and you lead your steed to a gallop.

You bring your axe down yourself and notice then that your brother bears a strange sense of familiarity stronger than just the one a familial bond gives. It makes you waver for a bit, forcing you on the defensive as your brother tries to take advantage of your momentary confusion and strike back.

When you manage to land a hit at last, slicing his shoulder, you realize what it is: that jacket was the very same one you mended just last month — the one you were so concerned with keeping from being stained with your own blood.

What a shame then that your goal now is to make sure the only color you see on it is crimson. It is either him or you.

Him or you.

_Please let it be you._


End file.
